Life and Works of Federico García Lorca: A Deep Dive
Form and Style of Federico García Lorca
Language and Surrealism
Lorca’s writing is characterized by its expressive force, capable of immersing the reader in the poet’s own harrowing experiences. His work’s relationship with Surrealism is often discussed, though inconsistently. Lorca rarely employs deep and persistent elaborate metaphors in the Baroque tradition. Instead, his metaphors are stark and challenging. His footprint is more surreal than poetic, evident in his cries of rebellion and a sharpened social conscience.
Verse and Meter
In contrast to the regular meter of his earlier works, Lorca later favors free verse, though assonance and rhyme survive in certain texts. In subsequent books, he cultivates a more personal and erotic style of poetry. While not entirely abandoning free verse, he returns to regular metrical schemes.
Divan del Tamarit and Arabic Influences
Inspired by readings of Arabo-Andalusian poems (newly translated by E. García Gómez) and his knowledge of Arabic poetry, Lorca embarked on a new poetic adventure with Divan del Tamarit. However, the book departs from the superficial and topical view of the East prevalent among European Romantic poets. While sensuality is present, Lorca remains true to his core obsessions.
Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías
In Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, one of his most accomplished poems, Lorca pays tribute to his friend, the bullfighter Ignacio Sánchez Mejías, who died in 1934. Despite allusions to bullfighting, Lorca avoids folkloric, picturesque, and philosophical interpretations. Throughout the poem’s four parts, the focus remains on presenting a mythical and exceptional figure confronting death within a surreal atmosphere.
Sonnets of Dark Love and Neoformalism
Beyond the extraordinary quality of the poetic language, the perfect adaptation of the meter to the elegiac sentiment expressed is noteworthy. The Sonnets of Dark Love fall within the neoformalist trend emerging in Spanish poetry of those years, which would become more pronounced in the early 1940s. In these poems, while eroticism is present (as in the previous book), a more spiritualized experience of love emerges. This may be attributed to the fact that these sonnets celebrate a lasting romantic relationship. Distress and anxiety about losing this love are dominant themes.
Lorca’s Theater
Desire for Authenticity
From the 1930s onward, Lorca sought a more sincere form of literature, one that embodied his own conflicts and the broader problems of humanity. He found this in drama. Lorca’s plays feature two opposing planes of existence: an intimate, subjective, and lyrical one, and an external, repressive, and conventional one. He suggests that transgressing these enforced rules is the only path to liberation from conventional reality. However, the dramatic resolution is always clear: breaking the rules leads to death, loneliness, or frustration. This is evident in his major plays of the 1930s.
Early Plays
Before his major works, Lorca produced several pieces that foreshadowed their possibilities. His first dramatic success, Mariana Pineda (1925), shares similarities with ‘poetic drama’ in its verse, romantic treatment, and historical theme. More successful are The Shoemaker’s Prodigious Wife (1926 and 1933), which explores the conflict between desire and reality, and Doña Rosita the Spinster and the Language of Flowers (1935), featuring a character whose life is frustrated by the impossibility of experiencing love outside of societal morals.
Surrealist and Symbolic Plays
In the 1930s, Lorca wrote the surrealist play Audiences (1930), with its unfamiliar symbols and images, including clear references to homosexuality. His best-known plays form what could be called a ‘dramatic trilogy of the Spanish land,’ exploring the theme of opposition between the desire for freedom and repressive forces.
Bodas de Sangre, Yerma, and The House of Bernarda Alba
Bodas de sangre (1933), the most vibrant of the trilogy, is a vivid drama of impossible love among Gypsies. Yerma (1934) is a tragedy of thwarted love, focusing on an infertile woman whose longing for a child transforms into irrational hatred for her husband. The play’s weight rests almost entirely on the protagonist, with other characters acting as a tragic chorus. The most accomplished of the three is undoubtedly The House of Bernarda Alba (1936). Its realism, despite the marked symbolism of many elements, offers a near-social commentary, engaging with the realities of its time. The play features the authoritarian Bernarda Alba, widowed for the second time, and her five daughters, cloistered in their home to observe a strict mourning period. The entire action unfolds within this silent, oppressive house. The outside world, represented by the townspeople and Pepe el Romano, is the true catalyst for the plot. Pepe, the object of desire for all of Bernarda’s daughters, becomes the focus of Adela’s (the youngest daughter’s) rebellion against her mother’s authority, repression, and societal conventions. The play culminates in tragedy.